wiki:GENIExperimenter/Tutorials/NFV/Ryu/HandlingIntrusionwithRyu-portscanning

Version 44 (modified by Nabeel Akhtar, 6 years ago) (diff)

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Experiment 4: Handling Intrusion with Ryu Controller : Port Scanning Attack

Overview

In this experiment, we will use the Ryu controller to handle intrusion traffic generated using Port Scanning application Nmap. The system is the same as the one used in Experiment 3, where we use a RINA distributed application to get the intrusion detection results from the VNFs (i.e., Snort) as well as the load of the VNFs. When an intrusion is detected by VNFs, the information will be passed to the Attack Analyzer residing on controller node via the RINA distributed application. Attack Analyzer informs the Ryu controller about the attack, which then blocks the intrusion traffic by updating the OpenFlow rules on the OVS switch.

(1) RINA Distributed Application

RINA distributed application collects the CPU load of VNF1 and VNF2, as well as any Snort alerts generated by Snort applications running on VNF1 and VNF2. These Snort alerts are collected on Controller node and saved in file /tmp/snortalerts by RINA distributed application.

We need Java installed on the VNF1, VNF2 and controller nodes to run the RINA application. Check if Java is installed using: java -version. If not, install java on VNF1, VNF2 and controller nodes in new windows (Type Ctrl-C to exit netcat on the sources and destination). To install Java, execute:  sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk
(If the install fails, you may first run: sudo apt-get update. In some cases, you may need to first run: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa followed by: sudo apt-get update.)
  1. In the controller window, download the RINA controller code:
  • cd ~
  • wget https://github.com/akhtarnabeel/public/raw/master/NFV-GENI/Control.tar.gz
  • tar -xvf Control.tar.gz
  1. Type ifconfig to get the IP address of the controller. Save this address as we will need this address to direct the RINA processes on the VNFs to the RINA process on the controller.
  1. In a new VNF1 window, download the RINA VNF1 code:
  • cd ~
  • wget https://github.com/akhtarnabeel/public/raw/master/NFV-GENI/VNF1.tar.gz
  • tar -xvf VNF1.tar.gz
  1. In a new VNF2 window, download the RINA VNF2 code.
  • cd ~
  • wget https://github.com/akhtarnabeel/public/raw/master/NFV-GENI/VNF2.tar.gz
  • tar -xvf VNF2.tar.gz
  1. Now we will change the IP address in the RINA configuration files for VNF1, VNF2 and controller, so these RINA processes can talk to each other. In the VNF1 window, execute:
  • cd ~/VNF1/RINA
  • nano ipcVNF1.properties

At the bottom of the file, change the rina.dns.name and rina.idd.name to the IP address of the controller. The following screenshot shows an example.

In the VNF2 window, execute:

  • cd ~/VNF2/RINA
  • nano ipcVNF2.properties

At the bottom of the file, again change the rina.dns.name and rina.idd.name to the IP address of the controller.

In the controller window, execute:

  • cd ~/Control/RINA
  • nano ipcControl.properties

At the bottom of the file, again change the 'rina.dns.name' and 'rina.idd.name' to the IP address of the controller.

  1. To run the RINA application, follow these steps (make sure you installed Java as noted above):

o In the controller window, execute the following commands:

  • cd ~/Control/RINA/
  • ./run_controller.sh

o In the VNF1 window, execute the following commands:

  • cd ~/VNF1/RINA
  • ./run_VNF1.sh

o In the VNF2 window, execute the following commands:

  • cd ~/VNF2/RINA
  • ./run_VNF2.sh

You should see output on the controller window as shown below:

The RINA application on VNF1 and VNF2 should be run as soon as possible after the RINA application on the controller is started. If you wait for too long, you will get null values for CPU usage, as the controller's RINA app is not able to subscribe to the CPU load of the VNFs. If this is the case, you should restart all RINA processes.

Note: the RINA distributed application also passes the intrusion detection results from the VNFs to the Ryu controller. This information is not used in this experiment, but will be used in Experiment 3 when handling intrusion traffic.

To stop all RINA processes running on a VM, run killall -v java

(2) PI Controller

The PI-controller gets the load information of VNF1 and VNF2 using RINA's distributed application and makes the load balancing decision.

The figure below shows the block diagram of the Proportional Integral (PI) controlled NFV system.

Block diagram of the PI-controller NFV system. System load L and target load T(s)=T/s of VNF1 is used to compute X, i.e. ratio of traffic diverted to VNF2. K` = K/T.

The RINA-based distributed monitoring application provides the VNF1 state (average CPU load) information L(t) to the PI controller. The maximum capacity of a VNF instance is T. If the load on VNF1 exceeds T, new traffic flows are forwarded to a second VNF instance, VNF2. Assuming instantaneous feedback / measured load L(t), the PI control equation is given by:

The code for the PI controller is based on the following algorithm. Input IDSload.txt is the file generated by the RINA distributed application. This file has load information of the VNFs.

  1. To run the PI-controller, open a new controller window and execute:
  • cd ~/Control/PI_controller
  • python PI_controller.py ~/Control/RINA/NFV1.txt

Note that here we are directing PI_controller.py to the NFV1.txt file that is constantly updated by the RINA distributed application with the load information of VNFs.

  1. You should see the VNF state information printed on the screen. A sample output is shown below.

Here the target load on VNF1 is 30.0% of CPU usage, i.e. if the CPU load on VNF1 is more than 30.0%, traffic flows will be diverted to VNF2. The current CPU load shows the load on VNF1. The next line of the output shows the percentage of flows that will be directed to VNF2 and the last line shows the flows that were being directed to VNF2 before the current control update.

Do not close this window; leave the PI controller running.

(3) PI-based Ryu Controller

(Same as Part (3) PI-based Ryu Controller in Experiment 2. )

Now we will run the Ryu controller that will get the load balancing decision from the PI-controller and direct the flows accordingly.

  1. First we will update the port.config file to direct the controller to the NFV_ratio_PI.txt file generated by the PI-controller, which has the load balancing decision information. In a new controller window, execute:
  • nano /tmp/ryu/ryu/app/nfv.config

o Change the value of controller_type to PI
o Change the value of file_path_pi to the text file that has the PI controller`s output.

/users/<UserName>/Control/PI_controller/NFV_ratio_PI.txt
Change the <UserName> to your user name.

  1. Now we can run the Ryu controller. Execute
  • /tmp/ryu/bin/ryu-manager --verbose /tmp/ryu/ryu/app/nfv_controller.py

(4) Run Snort

Note: keep the RINA application processes, PI controller process and PI-based Ryu controller process from the previous 3 steps running in the background.

  1. We need to first configure snort so that we can use our rules, or snort’s build-in rules to detect the intrusion traffic.

To configure Snort, in separate windows for VNF1 and VNF2, execute the following commands:

  • cd ~
  • wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akhtarnabeel/public/master/Snort/config_snort.sh
  • chmod 755 config_snort.sh
  • ./config_snort.sh
  1. Make sure that file /etc/snort/rules/my.rules is empty. This file contains any custom rules to generate snort attack alerts. For this experiment, we will be using snort build-in rules for detecting port-scanning attack.
  1. Update “/etc/snort/snort.conf” to enable port scanning functionality of Snort. You can update it by uncommenting following line and updating it with following information
  • preprocessor sfportscan: proto { all } memcap { 10000000 } sense_level { medium } logfile { /var/log/snort/alert }
  1. We then run Snort IDS on VNF1 and VNF2. In separate windows for VNF1 and VNF2, execute the following command:
  • sudo /usr/local/bin/snort -A full -dev -c /etc/snort/snort.conf -i eth1

Note: exit from previous instances of snort if they are still running from earlier experiments before you run this instance of snort.

Note: this command is different from Experiment 2, where the file /etc/snort/snort.conf specifies which rule files to load.

When Snort detects intrusion traffic, it will save the alert messages into the file /var/log/snort/alert. The RINA distributed application keeps reading this alert file, and pass any intrusion information to the Ryu controller which will block the intrusion traffic.

Note: If you want to re-run this experiment, make sure to remove /tmp/attacker.txt and /tmp/snortalert files on the controller node.

(5) Run Attack Analyzer

Attack Analyzer reads the snort alerts saved on Controller node and makes decisions about which IP addresses to block. Attack analyzer is the “brain” on the attack control system. It reads the file /tmp/snortalerts, which is generated by RINA on controller node and outputs /tmp/attacker.txt file which has IP address of all the nodes that Attack Analyzer decides to block based on snort alerts.

Open a separate window for Controller, run attack analyzer.

cd ~/Control/AttackAnalyzer/

python AttackAnalyzer.py -f /tmp/snortalert

(6) Generate background traffic

  1. We will use the iperf application to generate flows between a source and destination. If iperf is not installed on your nodes, execute

sudo apt-get install iperf

  1. Run iperf server on the destination node:

iperf -u -s

  1. Now we will generate traffic from the sources 1 (s1) to the destination node using iperf and see how it effects the CPU utilization at VNF1 and VNF2 running Snort IDS. Note that if we run multiple instances of iperf, we can generate significant load on the VNF instances. To run iperf client on a source, execute:

iperf -u -c destination -t 5000 &

Note that you can run multiple instances of iperf by running iperf -c destination -t 5000 & multiple times in s1 node. This flow lasts for 5000 seconds. For this experiment, you may try to run 4-5 iperf instances to generate load of around 50% on both VNF1 and VNF2. To kill all the flows generated at a node, run killall –v iperf

(7) Generate Intrusion Traffic

  1. We will generate attack traffic from source 2 (s2), so only s2 is blocked by the system. In a separate window for source 2 (s2), ping destination:

ping destination

Your ping should reach the destination and it should not be blocked.

  1. Install port scanner application nmap on s2

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nmap

  1. Download the Port Scan attack generator file on s2.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akhtarnabeel/public/master/NFV-GENI/PortScanAttack.sh

change file permissions so you can run it

chmod 777 PortScanAttack.sh

  1. Run the file to create an attack

./PortScanAttack.sh

Attack file has following content

Every 0.2 seconds, source node generates a ping to destination node and the output of ping is saved in ping.log file.

Soon after starting ping message, nmap is used to attack destination.

  1. As soon as the attack is detected, you will see the IP address appearing on the window for AttackAnalyzer.py. All traffic from this IP address is blocked by AttackAnalyzer. At this point, you can stop the PortScanAttack.sh file by typing Ctrl+C.
  1. We can use ping output file (ping.log) to measure how long it took to detect the attack. Since each ping request are made 0.2 seconds apart, we can count the number of successful pings. To open ping.log file, type

cat ping.log

Here is sample output

Here you can see that only first 13 out of total 422 ping request went through. Since each ping request is made at 0.2 seconds apart, it took 0.2x13 = 2.6 seconds to detect and block the attacker.

(8) Re-run experiment without load balancer

We will re-run the experiment without load balancer to see the effects of load balancer. Ideally, you should quickly detect attack using load balancer. To re-run the experiment, you just need to remove /tmp/attacker.txt and /tmp/snortalert files on the controller node. Now, re-run the experiment without load balancer, do following

  1. Stop PI-controller load balancer that we started in (2) above by pressing Ctrl+C on its terminal window.
  1. Make sure the value of X is equal to 0 in file ~/Control/PI_controller/NFV_ratio_PI.txt . If it is not 0 (zero), open it in editor and make it 0. To open file, use

nano ~/Control/PI_controller/NFV_ratio_PI.txt

and change it to X=0

You will need to run experiment multiple times and take average of values with and without load balancer. On average, you should see that using load balancer helps in quickly detecting and stoping the attack.

Next: Finish